AI Engineering · 100-level
How LLMs Actually Work
AIE-1012 creditscorebadge: foundations-ino prerequisites
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What's inside
Sections & lessons
01
Tokens & vocabulary
- Why the model never sees letters, only token IDsconcept45 min
02
Attention & meaning
- How self-attention resolves what a word refers toconcept60 min
03
Reasoning traces
- Chain-of-thought and the cost of an extra thinking stepconcept60 min
04
Lab + eval-gate: LLM fundamentals
- Payload autopsy lab and Foundations I eval-gate (Foundations I badge)concept120 min
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Optional · watch & try
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Hand-picked public explainers and open tools — always optional, never required, never graded.
How LLMs Work: A Visual GuideVisual walkthrough of the LLM pipeline from input text to output token How LLMs REALLY Work (Simple Explanation)Plain-language mental model for what an LLM is actually computing Attention in transformers, step-by-step | Deep Learning Chapter 6 (3Blue1Brown)Gold-standard visual explainer of the attention mechanism inside a transformer Transformer ExplainerLive in-browser GPT-2 running with every transformer stage visualized as you type LLM Visualization (bbycroft)3D walkthrough of a GPT-style model's full forward pass, weight matrix by weight matrix A visual introduction to tokenization in LLMs | Byte Pair Encoding AlgorithmShows how byte-pair encoding splits text into subword tokens step by step
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